How to get started: Learning Turkish

July 23, 2023

One of the hurdles of learning a new language is not knowing where to get started. In this writing I cover what I would do if I was to start and learn Turkish all over again.

First of all let me talk about the mental model required that more or less applies to learning any language.

1. Approach with a mindset of a five year old.

You can apply this approach in order to learn the alphabet of the the language and basic words like car, apple, tree, socks, jacket, chair, table... and the like.

Coming back to Turkish, learn daily used words and associate the context of how you learned it. Eventually you would forget and re-learn words but you won't forget the words you learned which have associated memory.

To illustrate this,

On my first night in Turkey, I learned hot in Turkish was sıcak (/sɯ.ˈdʒɑk/) when I was offered a hot tea.

Intuitively cold follows as soğuk.

From the above example I can introduce some things about Turkish.

  1. There is a letter ı → “i” without the dot
  2. The letter c in Turkish is like the j in English.
  3. Whenever you see ğ → “soft g“, read the word like ğ did not exist. Just ignore it.

2. What is Turkish actually Like?

Turkish is an agglutinative language. The word agglutinative comes from the Latin verb 𝘢𝘨𝘨𝘭𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘦 meaning to glue together. Words in Turkish generally have a root and a suffix. The suffix determines the tense, or whether if it is a verb or a noun.

So you can approach learning Turkish like solving a jigsaw puzzle.

3. Back to the root

Most of the thing you do when learning Turkish is visually breaking down words to their basic constituents — the root and the suffix(s).

Let us break “öğrenecksiniz” into its root and suffixes.